Thinking About Facebook
I finally got around to watching The Social Network, and, like everyone else- I really enjoyed it. I’ll try not to say much that has already been said, but I really feel like the film had a profound effect on me. Of course it’s a work of fiction, so the story is entertaining without being necessarily truthful, but what really stuck with me were the ideas of loneliness, of wanting, and of connectivity- and how Facebook brought all of these concepts together to reform the way we view our real lives, not just our Internet personas. That’s what Facebook has become- real life, interchangeable with the life we live in 3D. Does anyone remember Friendster.com? Shit, even Myspace is applicable here. What I’m getting at is that these pre-Facebook failures grew at an exponential rate, and then disappeared just as quickly once something better comes along. What’s next after Facebook? Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment- how many of us can really imagine life without it? If something “bigger” and “better” comes along, I’m almost afraid to move forward. What’s behind the door? Do I even want to go there? And what does it mean about us that the biggest social movement (so to speak) was created by a lone wolf, a man willing to sell out his only friend for revenge (supposedly)?
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Tags: connectivity, facebook, Friendster, Internet, movies, Myspace, The Social Network
Revamp!
Time to make this into something cool, now that my readership is officially down 10000%. I have tons of photos and ongoing fuckery to share with all the people who don’t read this, so I’ll try to eventually post an update or something.
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Tags: fuckery, revamp
More Poems. Weird.
I started working on this as an extra credit assignment for one of my classes, but it’s actually starting to take shape. If it sounds kind of like something Frank O’Hara might write, that’s because it’s supposed to.
Untitled 2
In the spring we go dancing
I wear new clothes every night
And come home stinking of vodka in plastic bottles, shared cigarettes and near-death experiences on the Sunset Strip,
Only to toss jackets, skirts, jewelry I can’t be depended on to keep
Into the dark crumpled pile at the foot of my bed, out of place in daylight.
We witness Paris Hilton getting her DUI at Les Deux.
Courtney Love tells me she likes my coat at Hyde
Cory Kennedy, hipster wunderkind, lets me borrow her ID to get into Teddy’s.
We hold hands and run wasted through the streets
I’m exhilarated, losing my breath, this is the best time of my life.
This is my life. Forget college
Forget my parents, forget the roommates I left at home playing Nintendo and sharing a bottle of wine-
Forget it all!
We are too cool.
Throwing up wine in the bushes next to your car
We congratulate ourselves on our glamour.
Spinning wild like tops, we are rushing, rushing, rushing-
So intoxicated by the experience we forget that we are, in fact,
Intoxicated.
Night after night, I forget my keys.
We giggle climbing fences, breaking windows,
Screaming from the second story:
WE WILL NOT BE FORGOTTEN.
Everyone hates us but we mistake it for jealousy
We scan gossip websites each afternoon over fried wontons
For pictures of us in the background at parties,
Being the people we think everyone wants to be.
It’s Halloween weekend, I haven’t heard from you in weeks.
I am in my mother’s kitchen crafting a bong out of a 2 liter bottle of Coke.
You call me, you want to visit.
I’m bewildered why you need to come here, now.
You tell me it’s now or never, and I tell you I have plans with a friend you do not like.
We hang up, and I get high.
November 7, 2009. I am at the beach.
Your friend Matthew calls. You love him, but I think he’s weird and refuse to answer.
Hours later, I am shaking sand out of my things in the late-season heat
Thinking only of air-conditioning and a nap.
Ryan O. calls, wanting to know if I’ve checked my Myspace lately.
What a dumb question, I think-no one uses Myspace anymore.
Then I notice his tone.
I ask what’s wrong, he says
“Call Sean”
And I know immediately. The buttons on my phone are wet
Slipping away from me as I try to place the call
He’s shopping for clothes for your funeral.
“He was trying to get better,” I hear distantly
“He checked into rehab the weekend after Halloween…his heart stopped…it’s too late.”
I can hear Sean (who I only met once, and was too drunk to remember)
Crying.
Shaking, sweating, I see spots and hear only static
As the world wheels drunkenly away from me.
It’s been three years.
I tried to keep you from slipping away from me
I made myself cry in the presence of wontons
I drank to the bottom every bottle
And then double-checked that you weren’t there
I refused to speak your name
to keep what was left of you inside me
And now, years later, I finally exhale, look around, and realize I’m the only one here.
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The Girl Must Be Crazy
Clearly I haven’t written in a while. Honestly I haven’t been doing much. I’m so wrapped up in my own head it’s impossible to see anything else. Am I crazy, or is it everyone else? I feel like I’m walking around in The Truman Show, that everyone knows something about me that I don’t know about myself. The sad thing is, I know logically that in the great span of things I’m nothing. Not a speck of dust, not the head of a pin, just nothingness in the space in geologic time. Yet somehow I can’t shake the feeling that everything depends on me. My inactivity aside, I’m so weighted down by this so-called responsibility I can’t fucking do anything. My boyfriend thinks I’m manic depressive, I say I’m not but as I speak I feel this uncontrollable rage swell up in me like a tsunami and I am simultaneously standing on the shore watching as I rage and rage and rage uncontrollably toward the shore. I’m filled with visions of standing at the end of a blackrock jetty in thick morning mist and feeling myself careening down the cliff toward the inevitable. My nightmares persist, I get so dizzy when I stand up that it takes all my effort not to beat my breast in despair for the futility of my entire existence.
I’m working on a group of poems to try to encapsulate these feelings. Right now, they are tentatively titled “The Body Poems.” Here’s a couple things I’ve been working on (don’t steal or I’ll hunt you down and put a pair of scissors in your eyes):
Untitled
If I could rip my own face off
I could expose the truth.
The rotting skull wrapped in living flesh
exudes a wet, putrid
Fiercely biological stench that
clings, glued to the surface with antique
dust and slime.
My fingers creep round the edges which
threaten to peel open like the lips of an overripe banana.
The nails, turning green, bend and drag,
exhausted, exhumed.
I leave pieces of myself wherever I go
Strips of skin, balls of hair
evacuate my body, fleeing a sinking ship,
preferring to take a chance on the open sea.
Untitled 2
my heart hurts. it’s hurt and i beat my breast with
words like mallets.
assault with a deadly weapon,
my body cavity is black, black, black
like chimney soot or the charred, ashy body
lying in the street after a nuclear attack.
On the Cliffs (in progress)
I stand. The wind licks my face, the rocks
are hard and knobby beneath the soles of my shoes
Worn thin, endless years and days
and hours and seconds
second-seconds.
My heart beats bloody and flaming
valves struggle to open and shut, desperate
to make an appointment with big blue doctor blue
Except I don’t know who to send when the one standing and the one watching
are the same.
To be blasted off this earth and onto the next only takes one
in the mist, steady and dressed in stripes,
one foot in front of the next cleaves
through the fog like the fell of a butcher’s decisive wrist.
Once the head is gone a chicken isn’t a chicken any more, is it?
It’s dinner
for the fish, falling behind in the food chain because it is me and I am it and you were never there at all.
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Dreams
I have been waking up every morning for the past week drenched in sweat-the kind where you wake up and the bed is soaked three inches out from the perimeter of your body-with shaky hands and an unshakable feeling of impending doom. Last night I dreamed of kids getting murdered. Not gang violence, no boom-boom you’re dead, but little kids getting their heads blown off yards away from me, my forehead getting splattered with blood, urgent drives through abandoned mountain roads with a black teenage boy bleeding out in my backseat. Toddlers sticking knives in their throats, I’m keeping a little girl’s intestines in her body with my bare hands. Clots of blood pouring out of me on the black and white bathroom tile, blending in with my red toenail polish, streaked red handprints above the kitchen sink. I wake up from these things and I can’t shake them all day. These aren’t the kinds of dreams that fade away-they stay with you, they wrap around you, shackles around your feet and hands, red vines tattooing henna prints up your arms. What am I supposed to say when people ask me what’s wrong?
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3 1/2 weeks, BITCH.
I’ve made it this far with only one craving-induced crying jag, and I hate to say it, but I’m damn proud of myself. I went to two parties over the weekend, and I kept my chin up and my Pellegrino-filled wine glass high. I must admit, it makes me feel really smug to be the only sober person in a room full of drunks, but I try to avoid displaying my sobriety as a banner across my forehead- I feel like it makes people uncomfortable. To be fair, probably not as uncomfortable as they would watching me drunkenly fall into the trash bins and then berate said trash bins for getting all up in my grill.
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Children of Boredom
I feel like everyone is out partying tonight except me. Usually on nights when I don’t have plans I just hit up the liquor store and drink until something fun happens. The cool part about that is, even if something fun doesn’t happen, I would already be drunk which is entertainment in and of itself. I’m about to Google “what alcoholics do for fun at night.”
UPDATE: First of all, “what do sober people do for fun” was already in my Google searches. Maybe I did it drunk late one night. Also, according to the recovering alcoholic general consensus, my big options for tonight include (but are not limited to):
-Go to a coffee shop!
-Bowling!
-Start an exercise regime!
-Reading!
-Video games!
-AA Meetings!
-Paint the house!
-Clean out your closets!
-(My personal fave…) WRITE A LETTER!
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I shit you not, the ice cream man comes down my block at least five times a day. He has a variety of noisemakers (bells, whistles, kazoos, you name it) and likes to play them to the beat of whatever kid’s song he’s blasting. Right now I’m pretty sure it’s “Jingle Bells.”
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Oh My God
Family wedding+sobriety+stuck in a room w/Grandma=HORROR.
My cousin is getting married Labor Day weekend in Minneapolis. I was kind of looking forward to it (new dress, open bar, hurrah!) until my mother called me and asked if I wouldn’t mind sharing a room with my 92 year old grandmother. I love my Grandma, of course, but she is pretty obsessed with God (Lutheran) and also pretty bossy. I cannot think of a bigger trigger to drink than sharing a room with her over a two day stress party-family everywhere, parents watching me like a hawk to make sure I’m not sneaking drinks, limited access to nicotine, etc. I have been comforting myself with the fact that, if I can’t drink, at least there will be so much going on that few people will notice me sneaking away every hour or so for a secret cigarette to cope with the madness. WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO NOW??!!! My grandma is quite possibly one of the nosiest people on planet Earth, and I definitely intend the double entendre meaning there. My mom tried to make me feel better by letting me know that there is a shared door between this room and her and my stepfather’s. Nothing could be worse. What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck. Oh yeah, I’m also the only one there without a date (besides Grandma). I envision a weekend of sitting alone (preferably with a good view of the bar to fulfill my latest addiction: booze porn), stuffing myself to morbid obesity, chewing my fingernails down to stubs, and holding back stress tears 24/7. Can’t wait! (p.s.-congratulations to Katie and Aaron-despite all these concerns, I love weddings, and you guys are almost unbearably adorable).
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